On mobile applications (apps) consumers and organizations have a strong concern over the security of their devices, network resources, and credentials. A common fear is that family and friends of an employee can log into enterprise applications having access to enterprise confidential data and perform risky transactions either knowingly or unknowingly.
Sometimes employees may naïvely request that a spouse or family member having access to a computer or phone perform some enterprise operation on behalf of the employee that lacks access at a particular point in time. The employee may need to perform some transaction or obtain certain information. This seems innocuous and may not be grounds for employee dismissal but can create serious security risks for the enterprise of the employee. For instance, suppose the family member writes the login credentials down for the employee in advance of performing the needed transaction so that the credentials are not forgotten before the family member has a chance to login to the enterprise application and perform the transaction. Suppose further that friends of the family member are around at the time or even visitors that are performing some work at the home of the employee. The credentials could be stolen or memorized with relative ease by a nefarious visitor. At some later time, that nefarious visitor may try to access the enterprise for purposes of obtaining enterprise confidential information and/or performing unauthorized transactions.
In the above scenario, the unauthorized access to the enterprise application could potentially linger for an extended period of time before it is detected causing substantial harm to the enterprise and the employee (whose credentials were compromised).
Moreover, even if the credentials are changed by the employee or initially incorrectly memorized by the nefarious visitor, the failed access attempts by the nefarious visitor typically can go completely undetected and never raise any concern by the enterprise. But, if the individual that unsuccessfully tried to access enterprise assets occurred once, there is a good probability that the same individual will continue to try and gain access. It would be beneficial to have useful information regarding even failed access attempts; currently, failed access information is generally limited in the industry to device Internet Protocol (IP) address, calendar date associated with a failed access attempt, and time of day for the failed access attempt. Such information is practically of little use when an enterprise is proactively trying to prevent unauthorized access attempts before those attempts even occur.